Category: Blog

Blog by Kate M. I. Scarborough, Dr Kathy Leadbitter & Dr Katherine E. Twomey (University of Manchester)"We never thought it was meaningless; getting to the meaning is the challenge"Sometimes autistic children repeat sentences that they have heard from television...

By Andrew Jessop, Fernand Gobet, and Julian PineBy studying how novice chess players become elite grandmasters, psychologists have learned a lot about how we become experts.Chess grandmasters can rapidly recognise patterns on a chess board and accurately recall...

By Katie Alcock, Lancaster UniversityHow do children differ from each other? Why does one child say their first words at 8 months old, but another one might not manage to say anything until 10 months later? How different is children’s early vocabulary in different...

Posted by Ben Ambridge “Do fish have barcodes?” My 3-year-old had just paid his first visit to Pets-At-Home, and clearly had some questions. If you’ve spent any time around children – whether your own or other people’s – you’ll be all too aware of their knack of...

Catch 22: From Objects and Actions to Nouns and Verbs Posted by Hannah Sawyer, Perrine Brusini and Julian Pine, University of Liverpool and Colin Bannard, University of Manchester Have you ever heard someone say, “The postman bit the dog” or “The plumber delivered the...

Posted by Gert Westermann, Lancaster University 9-month-old Elise is sitting contentedly on her playmat, banging her toy on the floor, and babbling to herself, “gagaga”. Like most children, she has been making sounds since she was only a few months old: squeals and...

Posted by Dr Samantha Durrant and Carly Hartshorn Sharing research findings with practitioners can present a challenge for researchers — after all, the leap from academic findings to real-world application is not always straightforward, obvious or clear (even to the...

Posted by Dr Jill LanyIf you've ever wondered how much the language a baby hears affects how they learn to talk, you're not alone. This topic has been of central interest to language development researchers for well over 50 years. In the past decade, there’s been a...

Posted by David Price-WilliamsIn an unseasonably sunny April 2025, I had the pleasure of spending a week at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI) at Nijmegen in the Netherlands, thanks to a kind LuCiD Travel Award.MPI Nijmegen is home to a multinational...

In this blog, Thea Cameron-Faulkner shares her reflections on sustainable academic travel, drawing on a recent LuCiD-related visit to Madrid. From supporting early career researchers to making conscious travel choices, she begins her story on the penultimate leg of a...